Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Got my grubby hands on a new HTC EVO smart phone last week. In and out in 30 minutes at the Sprint Store. Took my old cell company AT&T about 30 minutes to activate the new Sprint account. Pretty easy to figure out the functions, the battery life seems a bit weak at first look. Audio does have that underwater sound to it on calls sometimes. Surfing the Interwebz, sending messages, posting pics from the camera to Facebook all worked perfect.

The best part of the whole deal was working with Clarisse. She was 3x hotter in person than in this pic. Lord have mercy.

First week with the HTC EVO smart phone. The GPS app with say location and go is slick, only screwed me once out of maybe 20 trips (bout 1/2 mile off).

The flashlight app is the shizzle in rattlesnake and scorpion country. Email, Twitter and Facebook was easy to set up. This is my first touch screen phone, it does take some getting used to for typing and not hitting the wrong link or icon on a screen. Size and weight are good for my tee shirt or surf shorts pockets.

The 3G WiFi screams in town, out in the boonies not so much. It's workable for the Internetz and email. YouTube videos are a joy to watch on the big screen with no stoppages to buffer or herky jerky playback. The EVO has 4G (4rth generation) capability which rolls out here in SoCal in the fall of 2010.

The Friends Stream is nice to combine Facebook and Twitter feeds into one screen to ease the boredom in the airport.

So far Sprint's coverage has been good, even out in the empty desert south of Cibola AZ.

I went with the Aliph Jawbone Icon ear bud, The $39 hardwired ear bud the Sprint Store had sucked and the salesman warned me not to even try it. If that is so why even have the crappy non functional one on the rack to tempt suckers like me?

The one big beef I have is the lame AC/DC micro USB charger plug that plugs into the bottom of the phone. It doesn't lock into the phone so it's constantly having to be plugged back into the phone when you move the phone around in the car or on the table. I guess many of the new phones are using this type connection for power and data but some engineer needs to rethink this weak link FAIL.

One other minor bitch is my older IBM laptop doesn't have USB 2.0 so I can't sync the phone to that older laptop.

The camera is pretty good, I'm shooting 1 meg high quality pics that are stored as .bmps. Video worked fine to record the neighbor's drunken wife swerving all over the road on labor day weekend. The one small nag is close up pics sometimes are not in sharp focus, not sure if that's me or there is no macro mode or what.

Low light pic wasn't too bad on auto setting.

Fast action (30 mph) pic was okay, some overexposure in upper right.

I know, you're wondering "Why not an iPhone"? Well, to be brutally honest I'm tired of all the "Network Busy" errors from AT&T's overloaded network. The iPhone is just too popular right now. I like the bigger display of the EVO and the fact their apps are catching up to all the iPhone apps. Add in that Sprint has built their network out a lot better than AT&T and you have my vote. The Sprint phone bill is also cheaper, $69, if you need unlimited data and messages. I made my new phone decision after putting a Droid X, Samsung Captivate and iPhone through some testing. The one biggie I wanted but didn't get was the Super AMOLED screen which works better in bright sunlight.

Bottom line, if you need to take your office on the road so you can read email, share pics and video on Facebook and Twitter, surf the wild wild Interwebz, find addresses in the dark, this is a must have tool.

Oh yeah, almost forgot, you can also make phone calls with it since it's also a cellphone. I almost forgot to add that part in from all the fun I'm having using the other features.